Chessboards 10-12 (in the series of 64) have been released.

Chessboards 10-12 (in the series of 64 Great Chess Games) have been released. These are tournament friendly boards. The squares measure APPROXIMATELY 2 1/4" x 2 1/4". There are still 6 boards (#13-18) that aren't quite complete and should be finished soon. All boards now come with a complimentary set of 32 wood chess pieces (Kings Measure 1 3/4" high) and a small hardwood box for chess piece storage.

• Board #10 has 147 distinct pieces of wood. This board is made up of the following 9 species of woods: Squares: IPE & Maple, Inlay Around Squares: Paduak& Purpleheart Border: Cherry, Mahogany& Walnut Bottom Strips: Poplar and Redwood.

• Board #11 has 146 distinct pieces of wood. This board is made up of the following 9 species of woods: Squares: IPE & Maple, Inlay Around Squares: Paduak& Purpleheart Border: Cherry, Mahogany& Walnut Bottom Strips: Poplar and Redwood.
  

• Board #12 has 91 distinct pieces of wood. This board is made up of the following 7 different woods: Squares: Walnut & Maple Inlay on One Sides of Squares: Purpleheart Border: Cherry, Mahogany& Walnut Bottom Strips: Poplar & Redwood.
  

The Sander is Fixed - More chessboards coming soon

Turns out the good folks at Woodmaster sent me the wrong size threaded rods for my broken Drum Sander. The ones they sent were too short. Of course I found this out AFTER I put them in the sander. But...much to my surprise, I was able to re-use the old rods. I spent the better part of my Saturday drilling for the new support brackets and putting the old threaded rods back in, but my beloved drum sander is working again. I tested my fix by cleaning up 3 chess boards and I'm almost ready to post those 3 boards for sale on the Website. I've also completed the initial face glue ups on about 95 cribbage boards and I've started on gluing up the bottoms for those boards. I have to say some the tournament size Cocobolo boards are pretty wild looking! The grain patterns of book matched Cocobolo are just amazing. The 10 most prettiest/most exotic looking boards (of the 35+ Tournament style Cocobolo boards) will be in a series titled "Favorite Comic Strips of the Past & Present". The 10 boards are named after my 10 favorite comic strips and each board will include a signed Anthology (collection of various comic strips) from my self-published comic strip, "The Help Desk".

The Saga of my Broken Drum Sander Continues...

The saga of my broken drum sander continues . I found out that the threaded support rods aren't the only stripped out part on the sander. It turns out that threaded rods thread through brackets that supports the entire roller bed-the part of the sander where you place an item to sand. Fortunately, I found this out AFTER I called the maker of the Drum Sander (Woodmaster Tools) and was told that I would likely findthat these brackets wouldhave stripped out as well. But all is not lost. Woodmaster sells a retro-fit bracket that should (hopefully) allow me to fix this problem and finish sanding up the 9 chessboards that have been sitting in the queue awaiting completion for the last several months.

Templates, Window Shoppers, A Broken Drum Sander and Gluing Like Crazy

"Templates, Window Shoppers, A Broken Drum Sander and Gluing Like Crazy" is kind of a funny title, but accurately reflects the status of EnumeroCribbageBoards at the moment. I see lots of Window Shoppers (in etsy.com) and to a lesser degree on my website, my beloved drum sander is broke at the moment and I'm gluing up new cribbage boards like crazy.

Templates

Crib board template sales seemed to peak in September, maybe due to the fact people are making crib boards for the Holidays? I'm no longer using the cheaper plastic for the templates. I'm using a material called Chemcast Acrylic Plastic, either in a 1/4" or 3/8" thickness. It costs me between $11.00 to $15.00 a square foot. It's expensive, but it's really nice stuff to work with. It drills nicely and is really solid - not likely to crack or chip. My templates are still quite a bit less than other vendor's who sell plastic drill templates and the material is really thick!

Window Shoppers

Etsy.com is a pretty neat site, since it caters to people who make "stuff" and gives them another outlet to sell their wares. I like it and it's very affordable. A quick count shows I've gotten about 1100 viewings on the inventory sitting on etsy.com at the moment, but no sales in the last couple of months.

A Broken Drum Sander

My beloved 38" Woodmaster drum sander has been acting odd of late, and I finally figured out why. Two of it's 4 threaded rods used to raise and lower the feed bed, are stripped out. Needless to say, you want things to be pretty level when sanding, and stripped rods cause the feed bed to list to one side and make for very inconsistent results. The replacement parts have been ordered. I'm not looking forward to replacing those rods.

Gluing Like Crazy

The large group of boards I'm working on at the moment (100+ boards) are all mostly tournament style (long, narrow, single pass). I've glued faces to about 50 them and I am humming along on the rest. The prices on these boards will be vary from anywhere from $19 on the low end to $53 on the high end. The board faces on the $53 board will be pretty amazing looking. They're made from 2 strips of book-matched cocobolo and the grain patterns are just out of this world! These 100+ boards will be divided into 15 new series.

Templates are Selling Well - Who Knew?

I offer cribbage board drilling templates for sale. They are made of 3/16" or 1/4" thick plastic cloned off my existing metal templates or made from scratch using my template maker. In a sudden and unexpected surge of interest in cribbage board templates, I've sold 3 templates this week and I am working on a 4th custom template as per a customer's request. I figured if I sold one template a year, that would be cool.

If I had one pet peeve in this universe, it would be craftspeople who make and sell cribbage boards with sloppy, misaligned hole patterns. We as humans, simply cannot drill several hundred very tiny holes in perfect alignment. I don't buy the argument that it makes the board look more authentic, more hand-made.

My wife wonders if I'm hurting my own cribbage board business by selling templates and I don't think so. There are an estimated 2 million people who play cribbage on a regular basis. To date, I've sold 8 templates.

Clawing My Way Up the Search Engines

Like the hundreds of millions of other people selling "stuff" in Cyberspace, my website suffers from the common malady of not being noticed. In order to be noticed on the Web, you have to be on the first page or second page of Google or Yahoo search results.

So then the question arises, how do people find my website? About half the time, it's from other Websites who have graciously provide a link to my site. And the other half of the time, people come to the website base on a link provided by the Search Engines from Google and Yahoo. When someone searches on the words "cribbage boards" on Yahoo, my website shows up on page 1 of the results. On google, I'm still stuck in the never world of page 2 of the search results.

On average, I get about 7 unique visitors a day or around 210 visitors a month. I'm still not convinced that a website is the best way to sell my cribbage boards. The couple of times I've sold cribbage boards at a local craft show have shown me that people like to touch and feel cribbage and chess boards, and thus my boards sell well at the local craft show.

In general, it takes about 500-700 unique visits to generate one cribbage board sale. The results are about the same on etsy.com, although buyers seem more focused when buying off of etsy.com, since it's a website dedicated to all type of handmade and hand-crafted items.

Go by Bike!